East High senior Gideon Irving, 17, sends a text message Tuesday from his parked car at the school. With him are Matt Swenson, at window, and Max Bridge. Some teenagers said they see the bill’s safety benefits but think many people would ignore the ban.

A group of East High School students let out a collective “Whooooooa” on Tuesday when told of a new bill in the state legislature that would prohibit kids younger than 18 from talking or texting on cellphones while driving.

“That’s probably a good idea, but we probably won’t follow it,” one student said.

Such are the difficulties of giving orders to teenagers. But House Bill 1094 also prohibits adults from gabbing on cellphones without a hands-free device while driving, and that has set it up to be one of the biggest hot-button bills at the Capitol in this young legislative session.

The bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Claire Levy, D-Boulder, said she’s trying to make the roads safer.

“I think we’ve got a real safety problem on our highways,” Levy said. “People are taking the task of driving less and less seriously. It’s a dangerous activity, and people should be focused on the road, not on texting or dialing or anything else.”

The bill would make Colorado one of a handful of states that have both a ban on hand-held cellphones while driving and an all-out cellphone ban for drivers younger than 18, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association. Under Levy’s bill, the ban on cellphones also would extend to school-bus drivers and motor-carrier drivers regulated by the Public Utilities Commission, such as taxi drivers.

Levy said she started work on the bill before a 9-year-old Fort Collins girl was killed late last year by a driver police say may have been distracted by a cellphone. But she said that event has given urgency to the bill, which several Larimer County legislators have co-sponsored.

State Rep. Frank McNulty, a Highlands Ranch Republican, agrees cellphones can be a dangerous distraction for drivers but said so can any number of other things. Why legislate cellphones, he asks, and not other distractions like the car radio?

“I don’t think that we can legislate common sense,” McNulty said. “And there are a number of distractions that happen while driving that we don’t legislate. This is another example of the Democrat nanny state coming home to roost.”

Levy discounted that argument, saying the state regulates other in-car safety issues such as drunken driving.

The kids at East High School drew a different distinction. While most who huddled in the parking lot as school let out agreed that such an idea was good for public safety — even if they also all admitted to talking on the phone while driving — they questioned whether it would actually change behavior among drivers young or old.

A customer dining at Washington’s Oceanaire restaurant noticed an unusual line at the bottom of his receipt: “Due to the rising costs of doing business in this location, including costs associated with higher minimum wage rates, a 3% surcharge has been added to your total bill.”

Three fundraising giants decided to pull events from President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, on Thursday, signaling a direct blowback to his business empire from his comments on Charlottesville’s racial unrest.